 The Creation of Adam, detail, by Michelangelo (Italy) 1511 Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam "The religious ideas of Christianity [. . .] are impregnated with the majesty of fatherhood." Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929) Lounging on verdant green, newly emerged from God’s uterine dream: Adam in repose. Unclothed, his skin glows like burnished gold. His angled chin, hairless as a boy’s, and soft his youthful gaze. But a man’s muscles, in firm ripples, from shoulder down the extended arm, flow. Wrist, elevated to form an elegant arc, and the hand hovers in ignorance, yet, of the chasm, the infinite distance between two fingertips. And the small penile gesture plainly in view. God, His touch withdrawn forever. Draped in white like light spilled from a pitcher, He beholds from above what He has made below. His blue-grey beard blows back like curls of smoke. Young Eve held back in reserve, locked under divine arm amid a crowd of cherubs. The whole assemblage—God and his manifest—contained in a red swath of cloth whose folds, nudged by infant heads, belie the myth of heavenly birth. Cracks in plaster like wrinkles in paper crease this man-made universe. All is rent, unlinked, but woman-marked: Note Adam’s navel. Brook J. Sadler Brook J. Sadler: "In 2019, I was honoured to be a Featured Poet at the Dali Museum Poetry Series in St. Petersburg. My writing has also been supported by a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, among others. My poems have been published with many literary journals, including The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Cortland Review, Boiler Journal, and ROAR. My prose essays appear in Ms. Magazine, Pleiades, Aquifer: Florida Review Online, Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. I also publish scholarly essays in many academic journals and books."
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 Reclining Mother and Child, by Henry Moore (Britain) 1975 How Henry Sees Motherhood A sun-bronzed young mother stretches casually across the blanket she spread over the park’s newly mowed grass. Balancing on one elbow, she poses a tiny boy upon the pedestal of her still-round belly. They gaze adoringly at each other in an easy, familiar union. She is neither immodest nor grotesque in her nudity, her legs spread wide, solid and steady. Without reserve, she delights in her son, the center of her world, oblivious to passersby and their mumbled body-shaming remarks. This maternal queen owns the figure made more beautiful by motherhood, its fleshy hills and valleys made more vulnerable by loving completely her fragile creation. Leslie M. Rupracht Leslie M. Rupracht is an editor, poet, writer, and artist calling the Charlotte, North Carolina region home since 1997. Her words and art appear in various print and online journals (recently, Gargoyle and As It Ought To Be), anthologies, exhibits, and a chapbook, Splintered Memories (Main Street Rag, 2012). Longtime senior associate editor of now-retired Iodine Poetry Journal, Leslie also edited photography and prose for moonShine review, and was editor/designer of NC Poetry Society’s 2017 and 2018 Pinesong anthology. One of her poems is nominated for the 2020 Best of the Net. Leslie earned her English degree at State University of New York at Geneseo. She co-founded and hosts Waterbean Poetry Night at the Mic in Huntersville, NC.  Grandfather and Granddaughter in Warsaw, photography by Roman Vishniac (USA, b. Russia) 1938 Roman Vishniac, Grandfather and Granddaughter in Warsaw, 1938 You woke and the woman who For fifty years had weighed down The left side of your bed— Each night as namelessly as love-- Was cold. Her cough you heard Some time in the night, And though the silence that followed it Seemed to you too simple to be called ‘sleep’, You dozed off and woke in the morning Once the spirit had flown. It will take two years before you know Her death was a gift. Now, Someone readies to weep in the next room. There are guests to gather, A rabbi to be summoned, This granddaughter to break the news to softly. Andrew Miller Andrew Miller is a poet, critic and translator with over eighty publications to his name. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Massachussett’s Review, Iron Horse, Shenandoah, Spoon River Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Laurel Review, Hunger Mountain, Rattle, New Orleans Review, and Ekphrasis. In addition, he has had poems appear in such anthologies as How Much Earth, Anthology of Fresno Poets (2001) and The Way We Work: Contemporary Literature from the Workplace (2008). Finally, he is one of the co-editors of The Gazer Within, The Selected Prose of Larry Levis (2001) and the author of Poetry, Photography Ekphrasis: Lyrical Representations of Photography from the 19th Century to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Presently, Miller resides Copenhagen Denmark with this wife and daughters.  A New Year's Nocturne, by Childe Hassam (USA) 1892 A New Year’s Nocturne, New York He can’t imagine what she’s staring at; there’s nothing much to see through that plate glass— nothing as classy as his coat and hat or bright as her own dress. Why won’t she pass this dullness by, as others do, and stroll the year’s last hours away with him? He tries to coax her, but he knows he can’t control this woman he once charmed. Between his lies and her baffling rebellions, what remains between them is their duties and routines, and nothing more; a formal night out strains the roles they play in unconvincing scenes. In time she’ll turn to him, and stroll along, and smile, as if it hasn’t all gone wrong.  Nocturne, Railway Crossing, Chicago, by Childe Hassam (USA) 1893 Nocturne, Railway Crossing, Chicago Her friends—inside already—might suppose this ride unpleasant—but despite the rain, it’s cozy in this carriage, and she knows she’ll get there soon enough. The passing train has forced her driver to a stop; she wonders if others in her place would rather be aboard that charging iron horse; it thunders through town and field, each car lit brilliantly. She’s quite content just to observe the scene: the counterpoint of speed and stillness, light and dark; the air and streets washed clean; the vaguely dazzling puddles that invite reflection. She’ll be glad to see her friends, but not because that means this journey ends.  Paris Nocturne, by Childe Hassam (USA) 1893 Paris Nocturne Just like the crowd behind her, she wears black, but knows that on her it looks more severe, because she’s tall, because of her straight back and tiny waist. She knows she won’t endear herself to them by walking off this way, apparently rejecting friends and lights and flowers—she’s too moody, they might say— but what she seems to need most from these nights is just this solitary darkness. Wrapped in shadows, she remembers grief, and knows what Chopin meant; she senses depths untapped by those who would forget, and so dispose of half of music, much of love. Alone, she hears a silent nocturne of her own. Jean L. Kreiling Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two poetry collections, Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014). Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Award, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Award, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, and the String Poet Prize.  Tecumseh Barn Art, photo by Chris Bays, Artwork by Browning Design, and Painted by Scott Hagan Beyond Fallen Timbers White is the dominant tone of this barn painting that is larger than a combine harvester. On the left side, as from a cloud, a black panther leaps toward a name, the colour of blood, scrawled beneath its front paws. On the right side is the face of a man that looks white in the moonlight because of the cherry-pink paint on cheeks and nose. His colonial uniform adds to the illusion of race – like a white Jesus for a white congregation. But his eyes are painted black and at an angle to suggest both courage and sadness as they peer past the panther and across the road to where I am parked by a field. In block letters his biography is noted: Shawnee War Chief. Gold asterisks like frayed light beneath the panther add a nice touch for translating his name from Tecumseh to shooting star. However, there are no depictions of how he and his people were betrayed. I glance into the night. Lights from suburban sprawl dot the tops of trees in the distance. Those lights belong to Xenia, a city named after the Greek for “hospitality.” The Shawnee called that city and the surrounding land the “place of the devil winds.” But it wasn’t those winds that forced Shawnee families to flee Ohio over two hundred years ago. It wasn’t wind that caused them to stagger almost a thousand miles with children and elderly on their backs to lands not of their choosing in Kansas and Oklahoma. blazing comet … a snow-clad field filled with footprints Chris Bays Author's Note: This barn mural is part of the Ohio history barn program created by the Ohio History Connection. Artwork designed by Browning Design, whose work can be seen at dbrowning.com. Barn painted by Scott Hagan, whose paintings can be found at barnartist.com. Chris Bays is a father, college professor, art lover, chess player, foodie, and trekker. He received 1st place for Best Unpublished Haibun in 2017 and 2020 through the Haiku Society of America. In 2018 his poem “Waiting for Christmas in Ohio” won a Cottage Prize in the Genjuan International Haibun Contest in Kyoto, Japan. His haibun have been published yearly in the Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku from 2017-2019.  Driftwood, by Adam Oehlers (UK) 2017. Click image to visit artist site. Leaving Leaving this Earth, leaving everything, leaving this relationship, leaving friendships, leaving this situation- leaving my soul: snowdrops, trees with gnome doors, grape hyacinth leaves stretching above the grass, all the annuals, and the perennials already planted. I will not see your warm, dirty birth, forgive me, this does not mean I don’t love you. You see, with all that is going on here, leaving is better than staying. I have no fancy fórcola attached to my boat, this is not an oar, but a stick – I hear no opera in the thick, just the breeze detaching leaves, fool’s gold floating on water. I have not washed my hair in weeks, it hangs in streaks, battered branches. I’m Ophelia in Dickinson white. This dress does not fit, like most things. Goodbye. Nancy Byrne Iannucci Nancy Byrne Iannucci is the author of Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review 2018). Her poems have appeared in a number of publications including Gargoyle, Ghost City Press, Clementine Unbound, Three Drops from a Cauldron, 8 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Hobo Camp Review, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. Nancy is a Long Island, NY native who now resides in Troy, NY where she teaches history at the Emma Willard School.  Bed, by Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1955 Yesterday It’s a Sunday morning in January just before Groundhog Day and I’m waiting for my body to strip itself of this cold shudder; this silence without knowing what the sound of my voice tastes like when I go to sleep past midnight. I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today. It has been years since I slept in the yesterday. I imagine that when I dream, mouth coats over in sticky honey. I am mummified in warm fluid, preserved resting corpse. I wonder how many of us die and are reborn in one night; how many of us rest into our graves. My mother sleeps later now in the bed she reigns over, the bed my father forfeited after she filed for divorce. I only turn my lights off after the shards of yellow peeking out from the corners of her door disperse into the shallow dust of our hallway. The dark used to terrorize me, the thick velvet of shadowed curtains swallowing me. I couldn’t fall asleep without knowing where I was falling. I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today. It has been years since I slept in the yesterday. My mother tells me that I was born nameless. Before branding me, she wanted to feel the thump of my dry pulse, watch the way my soft bones bent between her fingertips. I only became something after emerging. What is a butterfly before emerging from the chrysalis? Worm wrapped up in a pocket of leaves, my brother used to squish warm bodies between his toes. What if, before emerging, I was just an ache in a quiet uterus? I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today. It has been years since I slept in the yesterday. What if my mother’s body had ejected me without warning, like a sliver of poison too sweet, too tempting? Perhaps then I would have had a name without first shrieking into the light of day. Perhaps then I could have been buried with an etching on stone and my bald head in the earth. Perhaps then I could have been orphaned. I wonder what I might be if my mother had wanted to eject me without her body’s permission. I wonder what I might have been if I died just as I became life. I wonder how many mothers eject body from body just because they don’t know how to name a part of their body that they don’t know how to know, a part of their body that becomes its own body just as soon as it emerges from a wounded chrysalis. Divya Mehrish Divya Mehrish's work has been longlisted at the National Poetry Competition and commended by the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award as well as the Scholastic Writing Awards. She has been recognized by the Columbia College Chicago’s Young Authors Writing Competition, the Gannon University National High School Poetry Contest, the Arizona State Poetry Society Contest, the New York Browning Society Poetry Contest, and the UK Poetry Society. Her work has been published in PANK, Ricochet Review, Blue Marble Review, Polyphony Lit, Tulane Review, Sienna Solstice, The Rèapparition Journal, The Ephimiliar Journal, Sandcutters, and Amtrak's magazine The National, among others.  Nude Study, by John Di Leonardo (Canada) 2020 Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished, influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. The prompt this time is Nude Study, by John Di Leonardo. Deadline is November 27, 2020. We are very pleased to have the artist, John Di Leonardo, who is also a widely published ekphrastic poet, as our guest editor! (Check out our recent interview with John here.) You can submit poetry, creative nonfiction, or short fiction. 1000 words max please. Guest editor: John Di Leonardo was born in Pescina, Italy. He is a visual artist and poet whose most recent ekphrastic poetry collection, Conditions of Desire, was published by Hidden Brook Press in 2018. He has published two award-winning chapbooks; Book of Hours (2014), and Starry Nights (2015). He is the recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award 2017. He is currently working on his Corona, a series of large format drawings based on the Covid 19 pandemic, and is looking forward to the ekphrastic writing responses to his drawing Nude Study. John writes and paints in Brooklin, Ontario. You can visit him at johndileonardo.ca. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include DI LEONARDO WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight, November 27, 2020. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! 12. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages!  The Ekphrastic Review is delighted to present our six nominees for the Pushcart Prize 2021. The Pushcart Prize honours the best of the small press. It has been an annual literary event since 1976. We are most grateful to Laura Cherry and Alarie Tennille for their assistance and suggestions in putting together this year's nominations. Reflection, by Barbara Lydecker Crane https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/reflection-by-barbara-lydecker-crane My Mother and Andy Warhol, by Robert Donohue https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/my-mother-and-andy-warhol-by-robert-donohue Photo of My Dead Son, Taken At The DMV, by Alexis Rhone Fancher https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/photo-of-my-dead-son-taken-at-the-dmv-by-alexis-rhone-fancher Seven Sadnesses, by Kip Knott https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/seven-sadnesses-by-kip-knott Horse and Train, by Lisa McCabe https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/horse-and-train-by-lisa-mccabe The Addictive Futility of Hope, by Brent Terry https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/the-addictive-futility-of-hope-by-brent-terry  Vintage Postcard. Details unknown. Seeing the Sights Marriage is a trap women set. Men try to find their way out, but they’re doomed to fail. Witness the defeated old gentleman in a top hat. He’s poised, ready to spring for the new bait; his heels have left the ground, but lo! The fierce grip and gimlet eye of his bonneted missus hold him back. The battleax. The ball and chain who won’t loose her grip on the catch she reeled in 25? 30? 40 years ago and won’t let off the hook, even as he lists toward the new bait, the fresh and wriggling worm, the one spot of colour in our drab Edwardian vista of duns and greys. The young woman with parasol, flashing a glimpse of stocking (shocking)! Her colour, of course, is red. Her draped skirt, her beribboned bodice, the plumy feathers that wave bravely atop her hat. The old gent watches longingly, perhaps, although his downcast eyes suggest a man asleep on his feet. The young woman droops forward like a flower, leaning on her parasol. Was this the age of the monobosom, the fashionable S-bend? Eyebrows raised, mouth slightly curled: a Mona Lisa smile or a grimace of pain? Is she weary of being ogled, or simply pinched by her corset? Her face is inscrutable. Whatever she’s looking for is far away. But look closer at our doddering husband and his hatchet-faced wife. Aren’t their clothes padded, their hair powdered? Is his stoop-shouldered gait a pose, are the grim lines around her mouth penciled in? When the photo shoot is over, do they dash home, drunk on the joy of earning a week’s pay for an hour’s pose; do they peel off their bulky clothes, laugh at the mockery of age on their faces, revel in each other’s bodies, in their love that won’t be like a picture, because it will never fade? Kathryn Kulpa Kathryn Kulpa is flash fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Her work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2020. |
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November 2020
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